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Overview

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller.

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump—the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night.

The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world.

Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

Product Details

About the Author

Joshua Green is a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek and a CNN political analyst. Previously, Green was a senior editor of the Atlantic, a weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He has also written for the New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Green regularly appears on CNN’s shows, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS’s Washington Week and Frontline.

Read an Excerpt

F***ing unbelievable, Steve Bannon thought, shaking his head in disgust as the “Breaking News” alert raced across the television screens in the Trump Tower war room. It was 7:22 p.m. on Election Night, the polls hadn’t even closed, and yet here was CNN’s Jim Acosta breathlessly touting a damning quote he’d pried out of an anonymous senior Trump adviser: “It will take a miracle for us to win.”

Bannon didn’t have to guess at the culprit. He simply assumed it was Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, and how the hell would she know? Conway was a pollster by trade, but she tested messaging, not horse race, and the campaign had cut her off weeks earlier because Trump preferred to see her spinning on TV. If Bannon cared to—and right now, he did not—he could have watched Acosta’s full report and looked for the Tell. That’s what always gave her away. Because Conway was the only woman on Trump’s senior staff, reporters avoided using gender pronouns when quoting her anonymously, lest an errant “she” slip out and reveal their source. Instead, they employed the awkward but gender‑neutral “this adviser” or “this person,” and by the third or fourth reference what they were doing became pretty obvious. That was the Tell. Some of Trump’s advisers had long ago caught on and joked about it.

Sure enough, Acosta cited “a senior adviser from Donald Trump’s inner circle,” followed by a trifecta of “this adviser”s, with nary a “he” or a “she” to be heard. Even before he’d finished talking, CNN— Trump’s obsession and bête noire—had billboarded the “take a miracle” quote in a banner that stretched across the screen.

But Bannon had already moved on. He could never fathom why people like Conway worked so hard to win goodwill from reporters (most of whom, he thought, were idiots with no earthly idea what was really going on) or why they cared so much about appearances.

It took only a glance to see that Bannon himself cared not a whit for appearances—at least not his own. This was, in fact, one of his defining traits. He had spent most of his life donning the uniform of the various institutions to which he belonged: the cadet’s uniform at Benedictine High School, the all‑male Roman Catholic military school he and his brothers attended in Richmond, Virginia; the naval officer’s starched whites during his eight‑year stint aboard destroyers in the Pacific and the Persian Gulf; and the banker’s expensive suits, a uniform of their own, which he’d worn during his tenure at Goldman Sachs.

But once he made real money and cashed out, Bannon gleefully threw off the strictures of the working stiff and adopted a singular personal style: rumpled oxfords layered over multiple polo shirts, ratty cargo shorts, and flip‑flops—a sartorial middle finger to the whole wide world.

Even now, at sixty‑three, having left a right‑wing media empire a few months earlier to become Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Bannon made only the tiniest concession to the Trump world’s boardroom ethos by swapping the cargo shorts for cargo pants and tossing a blazer over his many layers of shirting. Although it was Election Night and television satellite trucks stretched for blocks around Trump Tower, Bannon hadn’t bothered with a shave or a haircut, and he had a half dozen pens clipped to his shirt placket, like some bizarre military epaulet. “Steve needs to be introduced to soap and water,” said Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser. He looked for all the world like someone preparing to spend the night on a park bench.

But Trump needed him. Practically alone among his advisers, Bannon had had an unshakable faith that the billionaire reality‑TV star could prevail—and a plan to get him there. “It’s gonna be ugly,” Bannon would tell anyone who would listen during the closing weeks of the campaign. “But there’s a path.”

***

In the days after the election, the world wondered: How could this happen? Many people still wonder. No shortage of scapegoats and malefactors were offered up by way of explanation: James Comey, the Russians, the media, “fake news,” sexism—the list went on and on. Yet none was entirely satisfying, or big enough to encompass the scale of the shock, or capable of unwinding the sense of dislocation so many people felt when they awoke to the realization that something so seemingly unlikely—so utterly extreme—as Trump’s election could happen in plain view of everyone, without anyone really seeing it coming. It was like the opening scene of a Hollywood thriller, the sudden jolt that makes you sit upright in your seat, and after which some remarkable, winding backstory is gradually revealed. But the revelation never arrived. Even now, there’s a sense that some vital piece of the puzzle is missing.

That piece is Steve Bannon.

From Machiavelli to Karl Rove, politics has a rich history of the genius figure whose plots and intrigues on behalf of a ruler make him the hidden hand behind the throne, the wily strategist secretly guiding the nation’s affairs. So familiar has this story become that it’s a trope of American political journalism: if you’re a presidential candidate without a brilliant strategist, the media will often take it upon themselves to anoint one you never knew you had. The strategists, aware of this narrative compulsion, openly jockey to win the position.

Although he’s been cast in the role, Bannon is no such figure— or in any event, he doesn’t fit the typical mold any more than Trump fit the mold of “typical presidential candidate.” What Bannon is instead is a brilliant ideologue from the outer fringe of American politics—and an opportunistic businessman—whose unlikely path happened to intersect with Trump’s at precisely the right moment in history.

For years, Bannon had been searching for a vessel for his populist‑nationalist ideas, trying out and eventually discarding Tea Party politicians such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. At the same time, he was building an elaborate machine designed to destroy the great enemy whose march to the White House posed the biggest threat to those ideas and to everyone whose beliefs hewed to the right of center: Hillary Clinton. In 1998, when Clinton first posited a “vast right‑wing conspiracy” bent on ruining her and her husband, she was widely ridiculed. But she wasn’t wrong. By the time she launched her 2016 campaign, Bannon was sitting at the nexus of a far‑flung group of conspirators whose scope and reach Clinton and her campaign didn’t fathom until far too late.

At first, Bannon didn’t understand that he’d found the figure he’d been looking for. Trump wasn’t a serious candidate and would never deign to let some Rove figure govern his behavior—that much was clear from the outset. But Bannon soon discovered that Trump’s great personal force could knock down barriers that impeded other politicians. And Trump, for his part, seemed to recognize that Bannon alone could focus and channel his uncanny political intuition with striking success. Bannon didn’t make Trump president the way Rove did George W. Bush—but Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon. Together, their power and reach gave them strength and influence far beyond what either could have achieved on his own.

Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is therefore unavoidably a study of Bannon, too. It’s a story Trump won’t like, because he isn’t always the central character. And because, contrary to his blustery assertions, his victory wasn’t a landslide, didn’t owe solely to the force of his personality or his business savvy, and happened only due to a remarkable confluence of circumstances. This confluence occurred in large part because Bannon had built a trap that snapped shut on Clinton, and the success of this, too, was an incredible long shot. In fact, the whole saga of Bannon is every bit as strange and unlikely as that of Trump. He’s like an organism that could have grown and blossomed only under a precise and exacting set of conditions—a black orchid.

This book is the backstory of how those conditions came to be—it’s the part of the movie you haven’t seen. To understand Trump’s extraordinary rise, you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] deeply reported and compulsively readable account of Bannon's fateful political partnership with Trump…Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devil's Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon, some of which has been previously reported (not least by Green himself) but never so well synthesized or explained as it is here.

The New York Times Book Review - Bret Stephens

One of The New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2017 One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2017

“The first deeply insightful political narrative of the Trump era.” —David Leonhardt, The New York Times

“Indispensable.” —Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

“Mr. Green is a talented reporter and a gifted storyteller. The anecdotes he records from the chaotic 2016 Trump campaign are both well chosen (they’re there for thematic reasons, not as gratuitous gossip) and brilliantly told.” —Wall Street Journal

“You won’t be able to put it down. I certainly couldn’t, surrendering a weekend I should have rightly spent with the kids. I spent it instead with a 63-year-old nationalist whom Time magazine all but called the shadow President of the United States . . . Addictive.” —Newsweek

“Deeply reported and compulsively readable . . . Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devil’s Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon, some of which has been previously reported (not least by Green himself) but never so well synthesized or explained as it is here.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times

“Tremendous.” —GQ

“Vividly pulls back the curtain on the symbiotic relationship between two of America’s most polarizing figures. . . . Green is nothing but prescient.” —The Guardian

“Green saw Bannon as an important figure early on and began to track his career long before other journalists. As a result, Green had the material and access to produce a deeply researched and sharply observed account of a political figure and a movement that took most of the country by surprise . . . Readers will find no better guide to Bannon’s vision than this gripping and sometimes appalling account.” —Foreign Affairs

“One of the best, more thoroughly researched, and arguably most influential 2016 books to come out so far, Devil's Bargain is the product of years of interviews and tight reporting from journalist Joshua Green. He thrillingly tracks the influence of Steve Bannon and the alt-right on Trump's candidacy, persuasively arguing they were intrinsic to his rise and eventual victory. It's disturbing, fascinating stuff for anyone interested in this newly powerful fringe.” —Entertainment Weekly

“In this important and vivid book, the veteran journalist Joshua Green . . . examines the role of Bannon, the man who, on convincing evidence laid out here, was instrumental in securing the most improbable election victory in modern political history.” —The Times (London)

“Intelligent, insightful, and fast-moving.” —The Washington Times

“Delicious from page one.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Fast-paced, crisp, and cogent, this is a first look into a dark corner of history whose ramifications are only beginning to be understood." —PopMatters

“Joshua Green is an incredible storyteller, and Bannon is an incredible subject.” —Paste Magazine

“Splendid.” —Esquire

“Fascinating . . . required reading for anyone interested in the future.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Absorbing . . . the first thing I’ve read in the last year and a half that manages to make some sense of the human catastrophic weather event that is Steve Bannon.” —The Millions

“Behind the scenes and ripped from the headlines, Green’s saga exuberantly traces Trump’s wild ride to the presidency.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher

2017-07-20How a radical conservative with "cult-leader magnetism" became a powerful political force.When Green (co-author: Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, 2013) first met Steve Bannon in 2011, he "quickly sized him up as a colorful version of a recognizable Washington character type: the political grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend." An investigative reporter, former senior editor of the Atlantic, and weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, Green spent the next several years immersed in right-wing politics, resulting in a profile of Bannon for Bloomberg Businessweek, where Green is now senior national correspondent. Drawing on his own articles, as well as interviews and abundant media coverage, the author fashions a vivid, fast-paced narrative about the people and events that culminated in "the greatest political upset in modern American history," which even the politically astute Green did not see coming. How did this happen? is the question that drives the book. A crucial piece of the puzzle, writes the author, is Bannon, "a brilliant ideologue" and "opportunistic businessman" who, before meeting Trump, had focused his "populist-nationalist ideas" on supporting Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and on destroying Hillary Clinton. After seven years in the Navy, Bannon, "intoxicated by the go-go Reagan eighties," set his sights on Wall Street. He got into Harvard Business School, where his working-class roots set him apart from his well-heeled classmates. He excelled academically and was hired by Goldman Sachs, eventually leaving to dabble "in minor Hollywood moguldom," followed by a stint at a Hong Kong video game company. Back in Los Angeles, he met Andrew Breitbart, who became his guru. Green adroitly portrays many other players in the tumultuous 2016 campaign: Robert Mercer, who "resembled the bloodless capitalist hero in an Ayn Rand novel," and his savvy daughter Rebekah, who convinced Trump to hire Bannon and Kellyanne Conway; Paul Manafort; Chris Christie; and a cadre of people working to bring down Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes and ripped from the headlines, Green's saga exuberantly traces Trump's wild ride to the presidency.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency 3.8 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
11 reviews.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Many of us understood Trump. But it was a challenge to understand how Hillary went from a good Senator and successful and admired secretary of state to a someone we all questioned. This book explains it. It clarifies a lot as well as the still present danger of Steve Bannon and Breitbart.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

This was an interesting stroll through the relationship of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. It read anecdotally while also appearing to be factually-based. It seems to show both men as very narrow minded and arrogant; I came away feeling as if Bannon just had his Andy Warhol moment and clearer thinkers will prevail.

Crimald

More than 1 year ago

A pretty good book and definitely very informative about the making of Bannon, the making of Trump, and how they both became involved in the campaign. However, I think the title and cover do not match the content; Trump and Bannon do not seem to have that much or that significant of a relationship based on this book. Bannon was not somehow the war partner of Trump, more because Trump has no partners than anything else. The book does not claim that this is true, which I think is a good thing, but the cover may make it seem as though that is the argument. It is not.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Green reveals the true force and agenda behind Trump and this administration. Which is to replace our democracy and discredit democracy as a viable firm of government.
His point would have been made without getting into so many weeds of the campaign.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Thomas Wright

More than 1 year ago

This is a great book done on information not easily obtained.

BusyProfessional

More than 1 year ago

I've read excerpts and this is a must -read!

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

A must read

Anonymous

11 months ago

You couldn't pay me enough to buyy it

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Quickly churned out political books become irelevant quickly. This is a case in point, as Bannon is already gone. There may be a book about him but this is not it.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

A good senator and admired sec of state are you out now y mind. Hillary Clinton is one of the most dangerous people in the eworld.

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